Bail Burden Keeps U.S. Jails Stuffed With Inmates

By Laura Sullivan

Leslie Chew spent his childhood working long days next to
his father on the oil rigs of southern Texas. No school meant
he never learned to read or write. Now in his early 40s, he's
a handyman, often finding a place to sleep in the back of his
old station wagon.

But he got by -- until one night in December 2008 when the
station wagon got cold, and he changed the course of his life.

"Well, I stole some blankets to try to stay warm,"
he says quietly. "I walked in and got them and turned around
and walked right back out of the store. [The security guard]
said, 'Excuse me, sir, come here. Are you planning to pay for
these?' I said, 'No, sir. I don't have no money.' That's when
he arrested me right then."

When I first spoke to Chew last summer, he'd been inside the
Lubbock County jail since the night he was arrested: 185 days,
more than six months.

Chew is like one of more than a half-million inmates sitting
in America's jails -- not because they're dangerous or a threat
to society or because a judge thinks they will run. It's not
even because they are guilty; they haven't been tried yet.

They are here because they can't make bail -- sometimes as
little as $50. Some will wait behind bars for as long as a year
before their cases make it to court. And it will cost taxpayers
$9 billion this year to house them.

On this day that I met him, Chew's bail is $3,500. He would
need to leave that much as a cash deposit with the court to leave
jail. Or he could pay a bail bondsman a $350 nonrefundable fee
to do it for him. If he had either amount, he could stand up
and walk out the door right now. But he doesn't.

The money, says Chew, "is like a million dollars to me."

When Chew headed down the grocery aisle and put four $30 blankets
under his arm, he set in motion a process almost unique to the
United States that rewards the wealthy and punishes the poor.
And, NPR has found, it exists almost solely to protect the interests
of a powerful bail bonding industry.

The result is that people with money get out. They go back
to their jobs and their families, pay their bills and fight their
cases. And according to the Justice Department and national studies,
those with money face far fewer consequences for their crimes.

People without money stay in jail and are left to take whatever
offer prosecutors feel like giving them.

'Too Much Money'

On this day, Chew is still waiting for the offer. He is ready
to plead guilty and accept his punishment, but court cases take
time, and prosecutors have come to visit him only once.

The price tag to house, clothe and feed Chew so far for these
past six months: $7,068.

"That's a lot of money," Chew says, sitting at a
metal table in the middle of the jail's white concrete day room.
"That's really too much money."

I watch the calluses on his hands start to leave marks on
the painted steel. He says he's worried that his customers, who
hire him to fix and move things, are turning to someone else.
And he's worried about his white 1987 Saturn station wagon.

"I was going to get a regular car," Chew explains,
"but I figured a station wagon would be better, because
if I ever get in a bind, I can lay down the back seats and have
a place to sleep."

Chew's feet begin to tap under the table.

"If I lose that car, that's it. I don't know what I'd
do," he said. "Cuz that's how I get around."

Chew doesn't know it now, as he waits at this table for lunch,
but he's going to lose his customers. And he's going to lose
his car. And across this barren room of orange jumpsuits, most
of Chew's fellow inmates aren't going to fare much better.

A Life Swayed By $150

Doug Currington is sitting on his bunk absent-mindedly running
his fingers through a paperback book. Like Chew, Currington tried
to steal something: a television from Walmart at 2 a.m. while
high on methamphetamine. Currington has been here 75 days so
far, at a cost to taxpayers of $2,850. Standing between him and
the door: $150.

He's already lost his apartment and his job. His truck has
been repossessed, and he has no money to pay child support. And
perhaps even more important in terms of getting punished, he
doesn't have the opportunity to show the court he's sorry.

"If I can get out and hire an attorney, I can go to rehab,"
he says. "I can get my job back. And when I go to court,
my lawyer has something to work with."

"The lawyer can say, 'This guy has been clean. He's voluntarily
gone to rehab. He hasn't committed another crime. He's had the
same job. He's paying child support,' " Currington says.
"They're not going to want to throw you back in jail."

Currington's gut feeling about his situation is backed up
by statistics from the Justice Department and industry groups.
Defendants who make bail do less time. Several defense lawyers
in Lubbock said that in their experience, if Currington could
get out, go to rehab and pay restitution, he would very likely
get probation. Prosecutors are offering him five years in prison.

"It's stressful," Currington says, shaking his head.
"It's stressful knowing your life can be swayed over $150.
It's a matter of being free in two hours if I had $150 to being
free in three or four years when I make parole on a 10-year sentence."

'I'm Praying ... Not Too Much Longer'

All across this jail, everyone seems to have a similar story:
a daunting offer from prosecutors, a bail so small that most
people would just need to get to the ATM.

And in here, most inmates seem to think they're just hours
away from someone -- a friend, a relative, maybe a boss -- coming
to bail them out.

"Right now my family's working on it to come up with
the bond to get me out," says 34-year-old barber Raymond
Howard. "So I'm praying [it won't be] too much longer. Not
too much longer."

Howard needs $500. He has been here more than four months,
after he forged a check against a company. Like Currington and
Chew, Howard has no history of violence and has always shown
up for court. That's why he was granted bail.

Up to this day, the city of Lubbock has already spent $5,054
to house him. Lawyers say Howard would most likely get time served
and probation if he was on the outside. But in jail, he has little
bargaining power and nothing to show for himself. Prosecutors
are offering Howard a sentence so long, he catches his breath
as he said it.

"They started with seven," he says, pausing. "Seven
years."

With three young boys at home, he says, it's almost more than
he can bear.

But despite all his hoping, Howard's family isn't coming with
the $500. In fact, he isn't going to see his three young boys
for a very long time.

Released On Their Own Recognizance

Walking through the jail with Lubbock's then-Sheriff David
Gutierrez last summer, it was easy to see the impact of housing
all these men. (Not long after, Gutierrez was promoted to the
Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.)

"We're out of room. Completely out of room," Gutierrez
says.

In the maze of hallways, there are corridors where there used
to be windows and cells where there used to be closets.

"It really needs to be closed," Gutierrez says.
"I think you'll see it's not quite adequate. When you try
to bring in today's technology and standards into a 1931 building,
it's really pretty challenging."

It wasn't always like this. Twenty years ago nationally and
in Lubbock, most defendants were released on their own recognizance.
In other words, they were trusted to show up again. Now most
defendants are given bail -- and most have to pay a bail bondsman
to afford it.

Considering that the vast majority of nonviolent offenders
released on their own recognizance have historically shown up
for their trials, releasing more inmates on their own recognizance
seems like an easy solution for Lubbock. But that is not the
solution Lubbock has chosen.

County officials have instead decided to build a brand new
megajail, costing nearly $110 million. And Lubbock is not alone.
At least 10 counties every year consider building new jails to
ease a near-epidemic of jail overcrowding nationwide, according
to industry experts.

Pretrial Release: An Elusive Option

There is one other solution. It's a county-funded program
called pretrial release. Nonviolent inmates are released under
supervision, often with ankle bracelets, drug testing or counseling.
It costs only a couple dollars a day, compared with the national
average of $60 a day in jail.

Kelly Rowe, chief deputy of the Lubbock jail, says that pretrial
release is an important option. In Lubbock, it operates out of
the jail's intake area, where inmates are processed into the
jail, and he takes me down there.

Two dozen inmates are scattered about near a line of pay phones.
On the wall is a large sign with the number of every bail bond
company in town in bold letters. There's no phone number for
the pretrial release office.

When Rowe walks over to the desk where the program is supposed
to operate, it's empty. There are no papers, pens or signs of
work.

Rowe leaves to inquire why the area is empty and returns a
few minutes later. He says no one has staffed the desk for four
or five months.

When asked where they went, Rowe says: "It's like anything
else we do; we have a thousand functions we oversee and watch
and are doing, and it stalled. And I think the people responsible
for that staff reassigned them or said, 'Here, we want you doing
this other job duty.' "

That's not exactly how Lubbock's pretrial officials describe
what happened.

Blocked By Powerful Bail Bonds Lobby

A block away from the jail, Steve Henderson runs Lubbock's
parole and pretrial release program from a small, dark office.
He says his shoestring budget can't afford an officer at the
jail. He can't even afford to accept collect calls from inmates
looking for pretrial help.

"Follow the money," Henderson says. "Usually
whenever you've got questions of money, you follow the money
and they'll tell you the reasons why some things operate."

He says the bail bondsmen don't want to see his program receive
anything more than limited funding. The bondsmen "make money
and they contribute their influence," Henderson says. "I
would do more if we had the funding to do more."

But Henderson says the bondsmen lobby to keep his program
as small and unproductive as possible, so that no paying customers
slip though -- even if that means thousands of inmates like Raymond
Howard and Leslie Chew wait in jail at taxpayer expense, because
they never find the money to become paying customers.

"The bonding companies make a living," Henderson
says. "That's just the nature of Texas and Lubbock."

But it's not just Texas and Lubbock. Industry experts and
a review of national lobbying efforts by NPR show that pretrial
release programs across the country are increasingly locked in
a losing battle with bonding companies trying to either limit
their programs or shut them down entirely.

As Henderson walks back downstairs, he stops and reads the
sign above the door in the lobby. It says: Protecting our community
by changing lives.

"Jail doesn't do anybody any good," he says. "The
only thing that jail is good for is to keep the dangerous people
in the community away from the people who don't pose a risk."

But that is not who is in the nation's jails. According to
the Justice Department, two-thirds of the people in the nation's
jails are petty, nonviolent offenders who are there for only
one reason: They can't afford their bail.

The Ins And Outs of Making Bail

Across the street from the Lubbock jail is a row of one-story
offices with painted ads: Student discounts! Lubbock's #1 bonds!

Inside one of them, Lubbock Bail Bond, three young women work
the phones and greet customers. This is one of the biggest bonding
shops in town.

Here's how it works: You're arrested. A judge gives you $5,000
bail. But you don't have $5,000, so you pay Lubbock Bail Bond
a nonrefundable fee -- at least 10 percent of your bail -- and
you get out of jail.

"We put up the total amount; they pay us a premium. As
long as they show up for court, we make money," says office
manager Ken Herzog.

There are about a dozen bail bond companies in Lubbock, serving
a rather small population of 250,000. Herzog says it's a cutthroat
business that leaves no room for even a modest pretrial release
program. As an example, he describes a time he was working to
make bond for an inmate. A clerk at the courthouse told him that
the inmate had been interviewed by pretrial release program workers
who were working to get him out of jail.

"I said, 'Oh no, they ain't,' " Herzog says he told
the clerk. "So I went to the judge that signed the motion
for pretrial and told her what was up. They had no business even
talking to this person. They pulled their bond, and I got the
person out of jail."

I ask him if he is talking about Henderson from Lubbock's
pretrial release office. "If he gets in my business, I told
him, 'I do this for a living,' " Herzog says. "I said,
'You don't do that. We set this thing up.' I said 'I'll work
with you any way I can, but you're not going to get in my business.'
Well, he backed off."

It's unlikely Henderson had much choice. Henderson works for
county officials. And county officials are elected.

"We take care of the ones who take care of us,"
Herzog says. "We don't want to pay anybody off, per se.
We just want to support the people who are trying to help our
business."

According to Lubbock campaign records, bondsmen make frequent
donations to elected officials. Indigent jail inmates do not.

Little Risk, Big Reward For Bondsmen

The disparity has served the bondsmen well over the years.
Bondsmen's main responsibility is to bring defendants back to
court if they fail to show up. But it turns out that many bondsmen
aren't doing this job.

Statistically, most bail jumpers are not caught by bondsmen
or their bounty hunters. They're caught by sheriff's deputies,
according to Beni Hemmeline from Lubbock's district attorney's
office.

"More often than not, the defendants are rearrested on
a warrant that's issued after they fail to appear," Hemmeline
said.

Asked if the bondsmen are fulfilling their end of the deal,
Hemmeline says, "Well, it may be that [the bondsmen] can't
find them. They can't camp at the door 24 hours a day. They do
the best that they can, I think."

If a defendant does run, the bondsman is also supposed to
pay the county the full cost of the bond as a sort of punishment
for not keeping an eye on the client.

But that doesn't happen, either, Hemmeline says.

Hemmeline says Lubbock usually settles for a far lower amount
than the full bond. In fact, according to the county treasurer
in Lubbock, bondsmen usually only pay 5 percent of the bond when
a client runs.

Consider that math for a minute. The bondsmen charge clients
at least 10 percent. But if the client runs, they only have to
pay the county 5 percent. Meaning if they make no effort whatsoever,
they still profit.

Hemmeline says asking for more might put the bondsmen out
of business.

"Bond companies serve an important purpose," she
says.

NPR found bondsmen getting similar breaks in other states.
In California, bondsmen owe counties $150 million that they should
have had to pay when their clients failed to show up for court.
In New Jersey, bondsmen owe $250,000 over the past four years.
In Erie, Pa., officials stopped collecting money for a time because
it was too much of a hassle to get the bonding companies to pay
up.

Few Are Aware Of Other Options

It is possible to skip the commercial bail bonding business
entirely by just paying cash. Show up for court and you get your
cash back. But it turns out that this is not as easy as it sounds.
It takes hours longer to post a cash bail. And many people, like
Sandy Ramirez, don't even know that it's an option.

Ramirez came to Lubbock Bail Bond for her 18-year-old son,
who was arrested after getting into a scuffle with his friends.
They were charged with public mischief. Her son was given $750
bail.

She says neither the district attorney's office, the judge
nor the court clerk told her she could leave cash with the court
as a deposit and get it back when the case was over.

"I never knew that," Ramirez says. "That's
awful not to know that."

Lubbock Bail Bond tacked on some additional fees for, among
other things, paying on a payment plan. In the end, she owes
the company $260 -- more than half the cost of the bond. Two
weeks after the scuffle, prosecutors dropped all the charges
against the teens. But two months later, she's still paying the
bail bondsman.

Across the street at the jail, Deputy Jerry Dossey is manning
the window where people come to make bail. He says only two or
three people a month put up their own cash. More than 60 people
a day pay through a bail bondsman.

"Sometimes, it's hard to scrape up the cash money when
you've got a family to feed and everything else," Dossey
says.

One reason could be that judges aren't setting bail at what
you can afford to pay. They're setting bail 10 times higher than
what many people can afford to pay a bail bondsman. If a judge
thinks $1,000 is a good amount to bring you back to court, then
bail is set at $10,000.

A New Jail

About 20 minutes out of town, Lubbock's new jail rises from
the flat brown landscape as if from nowhere. On a tour, Sheriff
Gutierrez says the main corridor is almost three football fields
long.

"This whole area here," Gutierrez says, pointing
to just one room still under construction, "is larger than
our old jail that holds 600 inmates."

This jail will hold 1,512 inmates.

Gutierrez says he agrees there should be options for people
who can't afford bail other than housing them at taxpayer expense.

"The last thing I want to do is continue to keep building
beds," he says, standing inside one of the cells. "I
think there should be some opportunities to release them, put
them back into society, allow them to go to classes and go back
to work and report for trial when the trial date comes."

But as he's about to walk out of the cell, Gutierrez, who
has been elected in three landslide victories over the past 11
years, pauses. He knows the risk for any politician to suggest
such an alternative -- even if it means taxpayers save money,
even if it means victims will get restitution, even if it means
the only reason he can fill this new jail is because the people
filling it are poor.

Epilogue

Six months later and two hours north of Lubbock, the barbed
wired of Formby State Prison rises from the cotton fields. In
an empty visiting room, Raymond Howard, the inmate from the Lubbock
jail with three young boys and a $500 bail, is sitting next to
the Texas state prison's Coke machine.

"Here I am," Howard says with resignation.

Howard's family couldn't come up with the $500 he needed to
make bail for forging the check. Without his barber income, his
wife and three sons were barely making it on their own. He took
the best offer he could get -­ a three-year sentence in state
prison.

If he had made bail, defense attorneys say he would most likely
have gotten probation. But inside, he had nothing to show prosecutors
he would do better, nothing to show them he could be trusted
with a chance.

"It was something that I did," Howard says. "It
was my mistake; it was my fault. But I didn't have the opportunity
to show them. I apologize for what I've done. But I didn't have
that chance. And this is where you wind up."

It's a place too remote for his wife and three sons to afford
to visit.

Leslie Chew didn't walk out of the Lubbock jail until eight
months after he arrived, costing taxpayers $9,120. Prosecutors
eventually gave him time served for his blanket theft. But there
was a condition: He had to plead guilty to felony theft.

When he left, Chew found out his station wagon had been repossessed.
Without a place to sleep, he wound up at a homeless shelter.
A few months ago, he almost got a job as a maintenance man, but
when the owners saw a felony conviction on his record, they pulled
the offer.

In October, Chew walked back into the Lubbock jail and asked
the night officer if he could have his old job back, cleaning
the jail's floors. But those jobs are reserved for the half-million
people in this country who can't make bail.

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